2. Elias #2
The grin holds a second past where it should and then I watch it cost him to keep up.
I unwrap the knee. The swelling’s down enough to read the wreckage under it.
I put my hands on him, find the joint line, the points where the structure’s gone.
He flinches and bites it down, because he won’t give me the flinch, not this one.
I note that too. He’ll give pain a fight.
Good. That tells me how much the relief will be worth to him when it comes.
I press along the joint line, mapping it by feel.
His breath shortens and catches. He holds it rather than make a sound.
Sweat stands out at his hairline. His hands have gone to fists on the blanket, knuckles white.
He keeps them there, keeps his eyes on the ceiling, doing the thing he’s done his whole life with everything that hurts, which is to wall it off and wait for it to be over.
I could stop. The exam doesn’t strictly require I go this deep today.
I go this deep today anyway, because I need to know what his pain looks like before any drug of mine ever touches it, what his face does, where his limit sits, so that later I’ll know to the milligram what I’m giving back to him.
He thinks I’m being thorough. I am being thorough.
That’s always been the cover and the truth at once.
“Breathe,” I tell him, not gently, just an instruction. To my mild interest he does, lets the held breath go on my word, and the fists ease a fraction. He doesn’t even notice he obeyed. I notice. I file that too.
When the charm doesn’t land, he goes the other way. They always do.
“You always this warm with your patients?” he says, and there’s a blade in it now. “Or am I special? You strip my trainers off the board, you don’t say one word about whether I’m gonna skate again, you just— what, manhandle the knee and stare? I’ve had vets with better fucking bedside manner.”
“Your ACL and MCL are both compromised and your medial meniscus has a radial tear that’s the actual reason no one will give you a date.
” I keep going through the exam while I say it, flat, not unkind, just true.
“You’ll have two surgeries. You’ll spend the next several months in this building with me.
Whether you skate at your prior level depends on things I can’t promise and a few things I can, and the difference between the two is going to come down almost entirely to how well you do exactly what I tell you, exactly when I tell you.
That’s your bedside manner. That’s all of it. ”
He stares at me. The venom’s still up but something’s moved behind it, and I know what it is because I’ve seen it in every difficult man I’ve ever fixed: the small, appalled relief of finally meeting someone who won’t be moved.
He’s spent three days being handled gently by people terrified of his despair.
I’m the first person in the room who isn’t afraid of it.
Who looks at the wreck of him and doesn’t blink.
“You don’t care if I like you,” he says slowly, like he’s reading it off my face.
“No.”
And there it is. The grin’s gone now, entirely.
What’s left is the actual man underneath, younger than twenty-five and badly frightened.
He looks at me like I’ve been looked at exactly a handful of times in my life, the look that has always, every time, been the beginning of the end for the person giving it.
Like I’m solid ground. Like I’m the one fixed thing in a room that’s been spinning for three days.
I have wanted, my whole career, to be needed and never to need.
I’m very good at the first half. Standing over Roman Vane’s bed with his ruined knee under my hands and that look on his face, I feel the thing I’ve never let myself feel for a patient, the small warm catch low in the chest, the wanting to be looked at like that again tomorrow, and I do the only safe thing with it. I set it down. I straighten.
“I’ll see you when they discharge you,” I say. “Eight a.m. Don’t be late and don’t be drunk.” I let that one land, watch it land, watch him understand that I read his file all the way down. “We start the day you get home.”
—
In the corridor, I stop at the window.
It’s nothing. A bank of glass over the parking structure, grey morning, my own reflection laid faint over the cars below, and I stand there a few seconds longer than a man with a full schedule should. My jaw’s tight. I make it loosen.
I think about Caleb without deciding to, which is how I always think about Caleb, the only person I was ever supposed to keep upright and the one I couldn’t.
I think about the look on the boy’s face in there, the solid-ground look.
And I tell myself the lie in its most flattering form: that this time I’m the one in control of it, that this time I’ll be careful enough, that needing me is the safest thing that could happen to a young man with a drinking note in his file and no one watching but me.
Below me a car pulls out of the structure and another takes its space.
The glass throws my own face back at me thin and grey, a tall man in a good coat who fixes people for a living and has never let one of them fix anything in him.
I’ve looked worse. I’ve looked better. I’ve never looked like a man about to make a mistake, and I won’t today either, because that’s not what this will feel like from the inside.
It never is. From the inside it will feel like care, every step of it, right up until the end.
I straighten my coat. There’s a thread at the cuff and I don’t pull it, because you don’t pull the thread, you trim it later, cleanly, where it won’t show.
Then I go to my next patient, and my hands are steady, and no one I pass in the hall sees anything at all.